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- Convenor:
-
Ray Lucas
(Manchester Metropolitan University)
- Discussant:
-
Tim Ingold
(University of Aberdeen)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Queen Elizabeth House (QEH) SR1
- Start time:
- 21 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The aim is to consider human aspects of geometry: how geometric understanding is mobilised in the world; the implications of alternatives; and what geometry allows us to do. Papers are invited which discuss geometry as a skilled way of knowing our bodies, our hands, and our place in the world.
Long Abstract:
This panel builds upon cross-disciplinary workshops held at the Universities of Manchester (architecture) and Aberdeen (anthropology) on anthropology and geometry. The aim is to consider human aspects of geometry: how geometric understanding is mobilised in the world; the implications of alternatives; and what geometry allows us to do.
Each mode of design and making uses geometry: a spatial and formal knowledge of the world. Imagination and creativity are essential to understanding practices of making, of design. Geometry is one aspect of this, a means by which the life-world is both described and controlled.
Understanding of geometries is essential our knowledge of and through design and craft practice. Geometries are multiple, and specific to the needs and environment of each profession, be they weavers, painters, surveyors, architects or engineers. Discussion of geometry often implies singular and universal understandings, but nothing could be further from the truth. panel will investigate the presence and role of geometries in a range of practices where geometry can be understood as both a skill and a tool.
Papers are invited which discuss geometry as a skill and practice, as a way of knowing materials and the world. Geometry is not static: it is mobilised by the movements of our bodies, our hands, and our place in the world.
Potential themes include, but are not limited to:
Material Knowledge;
Sense-Making through Geometry;
Processes of Abstraction;
Movement, Breath and the Human Body;
Recording and Representing, Projection and Inscription;
Imagination and Emergence;
'Universal' Geometries;
Geometry as Earth-Measurement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Ricardo Nemirovsky (MMU)
Paper short abstract:
Geometries of anthropology elucidate how things and the world appear to living beings. This paper overviews four geometries of anthropology and includes a case study framed by Steinbock's analysis of the lifeworld in terms of two transcendental modalities: world-as-horizon and earth-as-ground
Paper long abstract:
Geometries of anthropology support investigations of how things and the world appear to living beings. They inquire into how surfaces, lines and points emerge and grow in the course of working with materials, travelling through and inhabiting places, crossing boundaries, and practically measuring the extent of things. Such geometries, which are both relational and continuous, invite us to interweave core geometrical ideas, such as of parallelism, horizon, surface, infinitude and curvature, with lived experiences, affects and traditions. I briefly overview four geometries of anthropology: 1) Euclid's Optics, which is the oldest surviving text about the mathematics of optics, 2) Projective Geometry, the study of projective transformations between surfaces, 3) Optical Flow, an approach pioneered by Gibson, focused on apparent flows in the visual field, and 4) Differential Geometry, as it pertains to local studies of surfaces and curvature. I shall outline some major lines of research that bring together geometries and anthropology, by way of an exploratory case study focusing specifically on philosophies and experiences of the horizon. The study is framed by Steinbock's (1995) interpretation of the lifeworld as encompassing two transcendental modalities: world-as-horizon and earth-as-ground. I draw on video-notes compiled during activities with university students in a course on projective geometry. These notes document students' experiences and reflections in projecting large curves traced with a rope on a football field. The behavior of the projected curves, as they approach and depart from the horizon, prompts students to cultivate new intuitions on the nature of horizon and projective transformations.
Michele Feder-Nadoff (El Colegio de Michoacán)
Paper short abstract:
For the coppersmith artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre, geometry is an essential tool in creating their symmetrical forms and designs. How is abstract geometry materialized through bodily gesture, tool-use and copper? This paper examines material geometry enacted in the symmetry of forging vessels.
Paper long abstract:
The coppersmith artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre incorporate geometry as an essential component of their skilled bodily practice. This geometry is carried out in gestures, movements and rhythms, whose patterns, impulses and symmetries are involved in forging the appropriate tools as well as the copper vessels. To design a vessel is to imagine all its surface paths; its inner and outer surfaces and spaces, a knit fusion of skin and bones.
Copper is both armature and membrane, stretched and shaped by hammers from inside and outside over stakes and anvils. To realize the repeating symmetrical shapes and designs of their copper vessels, it is necessary for the smiths to create very specific tools. How is geometry employed in making and using these chisels, hammers, compasses and stakes? How might this fuse mathematical abstraction into material geometry? How is the body's own symmetry engaged?
How might Franz Boas's ideas of rhythm and symmetry help us explore geometry as embodied knowing, calculation, assessment and resolution? How might bodily movement in skilled practices and techniques be shaped by the body's own geometry and symmetries? How might copper-things embody artisans bodily symmetries? This paper grows out of long-term apprenticeship-based ethnography with the traditional coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre, in the Mexican State of Michoacán, initiated in 1997.
Nick Dunn (Lancaster University) Dan Dubowitz
Paper short abstract:
We use the term speculative anthropology to define spatial provocations which are made temporally by human collectives in the lived world. Our action-research practice of 'collaborative urbanism' is a means of defining and re-examining our sense of place in the world and how it can be transformed.
Paper long abstract:
How might we understand and make the city differently? What role do people and their collective geometries play in shaping our recording and representation of urban landscapes? This paper presents creative-critical methods that question how we directly engage with the built environment via different spatial practices. Collective movement here is positioned as a method of activating geometry, to develop material knowledge and sense-making of our environment. Spatial readings of urban environments are essential to our ability to navigate, demarcate and appropriate them for new uses. Importantly, their geometry is understood tacitly. We use the term speculative anthropology to define spatial provocations which are made temporally by human collectives in the lived world to redefine and change the nature of places. Our action-research practice of 'collaborative urbanism' is a means of defining and re-examining our sense of place in the world and how it can be transformed. Key to this is the plurality of different experiences and knowledges constructed through imaginative and creative engagement with urban places by participants to project and inscribe them in meaningful ways. Our paper consists of three elements: to frame our action-research practice of 'collaborative urbanism' in the context of Glasgow; to illustrate the findings of our practice via a short film; and to open up a dialogue concerning the insights into human aspects of geometry that collective movement in urban environments provides. To conclude we will discuss the implications for urban design that the choreography and knowledge of this practice of speculative anthropology offers.
Johanne Verbockhaven (UCLouvain)
Paper short abstract:
This contribution is based on the ephemeral aerial weaving installation and the concept of global interconnectivity, movements, inter-sections about the Anthropocene period during the human being's influence on the biosphere became a major "ecological force" capable of marking the lithosphere.
Paper long abstract:
According to its definition, the term Anthropocene designates a period during which the influence of the human being on the biosphere has reached such a level that it became a major "ecological force" capable of marking the lithosphere. Beyond the concept of ecological footprint it seemed to me that the global connection and repercussions of visible human activities through satellite imagery are some of the major phenomena since the advent of the industrial era's world.
For the first time in humanity, the human being can perceive with hindsight the earth, to create a mental representation of its terrestrial base on which it evolves as well as the luminous traces of the human activity, mainly related to industrial activities. Result of our ecological footprint.
Migratory flows are one of the contemporary issues related to climate changes. This satellite imagery and the global weaving of lines that it's reveals appear strangely to the palm of the hand of human being by the design of the rhizomes that constitute the fingerprints. Fingerprints in the heart right now the whole question of migratory flows and movement of human beings leading to despair by self-mutilation of their fingerprints digitals whose erasure is subsequent.
It follows from Z. Bauman investigations that social separation, freedom of movement, non-engagement are the first stakes of a cultural game that is of crucial importance for contemporary "global" elites. Those (both intellectual and cultural) are mobile and extra-territorial, unlike the majority fo those who remain "tied to the ground".
Jaime Refoyo
Paper short abstract:
This paper try to discuss about the relationship between body and space from the thesis of that we cannot know the meaning of our nature without previously knowing the geometry of our thought upon the nature which we tread.
Paper long abstract:
If we are thinking beings, why do we find it so hard to think? The question is not why do we think, the question is if I am what I think.
This paper try to discuss about the relationship between body and space from the thesis of that we cannot know the meaning of our nature without previously knowing the geometry of our thought upon the nature which we tread. Because we do not create, we walk. What type of identity are we preserving when we move through the spaces and bodies around us?
Because not only can we aspire to understand this natural language the body uses to organize the space around us on the basis of a very concrete geometry, but we can also speak with this language of the body; that is, we can guide it while acknowledging its way of thinking. We are not only relational matter, but also organizers of that matter. The geometry revealed by my study shows that we can think within the process that leads matter to organize. We can think about matter that thinks -our body- to define the order around us, and with it, perhaps, not only define ourselves, but also be acknowledged by the rest of nature. But what can we think that is different to how our body is already thinking through its actions?
Ester Gisbert Alemany (Universidad de Alicante)
Paper short abstract:
For rethinking the tools of contemporary urban planning, I study the geometries used in the process of setting out buildings in different coastal grounds. I explore the relation between the controlling geometry of abstraction with the creative potential of material variations and misalignments.
Paper long abstract:
As part of a research on the line of the 'Costa Blanca', in Mediterranean Spain, I explore and rethink the tools of contemporary urban planning. I study how this territory has been transformed with the geometries that fix forms in the abstract space of Modern cartography. Specifically, a concrete geometrical operation, the offset, that is used to fix, from the line of the coast, the strip of public space that stakeholders will subsequently negotiate for the production of enjoyment. Placed in the hyphen between anthropology and architecture, I also explore this geometrical tool closer and materially. The offset becomes also the geometry of how things and people craft themselves together, in the process of abstraction that occurs every time two materials or bodies come into relation. On one hand, the offset shows the power of conventions set outside of the realm of making for coordinating different practices and, in the other, the offset shows the creative potential of variations and misalignments. I present the relations between these two poles, not opposed in practice, with the account of the work done as an architect and with builders, together with impressions of other designers, in the setting-out of foundations for buildings in this coastal territory: in cliffs, plains, landfill and alluvial terrains. As in every other craft, the beginnings of the work are key for the consequent growth of forms and a perfect place for rethinking how we both want to control the ground and allow creativity in our relation to landscape.
Robin Schaeverbeke (Faculty of Architecture KULeuven)
Paper short abstract:
Can perspective be 'wrong'? Or is the supposed wrongness a matter of position, cultural heritage, or psychological state of mind? 'Wrong Perspectives' explores geometrical approaches to extend conventional perspective systems so that they are able to include rather than exclude. Co-authors: Dirk Huylebrouck and Ann Heylighen
Paper long abstract:
The 'wrong perspective' research is an attempt to fuse different fields by exploring and inventing alternative ways of depicting the world, by combining geometry, design and intuition. The research looks for extensions of vanishing point perspective, such as in pre-Renaissance Oriental art, in Eastern-European art, in Asian or African art (Huylebrouck, 2016), etc. These extensions provide methods to construct alternative kinds of perspective so that they can be put on a par with conventional ways of depiction. By mixing and matching several projective methods we look for ways to propose alternatives for conventional and even intuitive models for depiction. Our proposition does not question established nor conventional ways of depiction but, rather, looks for ways to extend them.
By using (descriptive) geometry as a methodology we want to explore alleged 'wrong perspectives' as equally valuable alternatives. We simultaneously reflect upon some of the (cultural) implications of both convention and extension. Perhaps one of the main questions is in what way translating, sharing and making different systems understandable could broaden our imaginary vocabulary - broaden our collective visual languages. A broader question is whether using geometry in this way could be a means to put different visual languages on an equal footing (similar to spoken languages) and from there to what extent it could be used to construct bridges between different (visual) cultures. Another tempting question is to what extent this approach could be used to provide so-called non-initiated artists a more personal way to envision the world.